This is a linear part of Africa stretching along the southeast end of the Red Sea and reaching the west end of the Gulf of Aden. At the north is the fat part of Eritrea, in the middle a narrow strip, and in the south, Djibouti: another bulge, smaller than northern Eritrea.
Through the center of northern Eritrea is a range of mountains, reaching nearly 3000 meters, part of the Ethiopian highlands. Short rivers flow east into the sea from its heights. To its west are plateaus, separated by intermittent streams.
The Denakil desert dominates central and southern Eritrea. Not far east of the northern range is a depression that is below sea level, dropping more as one goes south into Ethiopia.
Djibouti rises quickly to plateaus except for a sharp cut in its center that nearly splits the nation. This begins as the Gulf of Tadjoura and continues as a depression that drops below sea level not far inland along a lakeshore. Another lake, Abbe, straddles the Ethiopian border in Djibouti's southwest.
Eritrea includes the Dahlak Archipelago, east of northern Eritrea.
There is no majority language but 19 in 20 speak Afro-Asiatic languages. This group includes Chushitic and Semitic languages. About two-thirds of the people speak Semitic languages and more than a quarter Cushitic. The Semitic languages include the North Ethiopic group and Arabic. About 61 percent of the people speak North Ethiopian langauges and about seven percent a form of spoken Arabic(3). The North Ethiopian languages here are Tigrigna(4), spoken by 43 percent, and Tigre, spoken by 18 percent.
The Cushitic languages include the East Cushitic group, spoken by less than one in four in the two nations, and two other languages. The East Cushitic group includes the Saho-Afar group and Somali. The Saho-Afar languages are used by less than one in five and Somali by about one in twenty. The Saho-Afar group's chief language is Afar, spoken by about 15 percent of the locals.
Almost three-quarters of the people are Sunni Moslems, the rest Christians. Of the Christians almost all of them are Coptic.
Asmara(5), the capital of Eritrea, is the only city with over a million metropolitan residents. There is a drop of more than 2000 meters from this city to its port, 40 kilometers east on the Red Sea.
Many thousands of years ago, speakes of Cushitic, a branch of Afro-Asiatic languages, moved into the area from the southeast. Later, according to the theory of Christopher Ehret, Boreafrasian languages--a hypothesized one-time branch of the Afro-Asiatic group--passed through the area and spread far westward and northward. This group gave rise to the Semitic languages far outside the area. These spread to southern Arabia. About 2000 years ago, one group of South Arabian Semities moved en masse across the Red Sea to the Eritrean coast. These spoke Ethiopic, the ancestor of the language group that includes the current local majority.
A king of Axum, which ruled the north Eritrean area, converted to Coptic Christianity in the fourth century C.E. Islam entered a few centuries later and the coastal majority converted.
northeast of most of Eritrea
northeast of southernmost Eritrea and northern Djibouti
east of central Djibouti
south and southeast of Djibouti
west of Djibouti and south of Eritrea
west, from the northwest
northwest
(1) Sometimes transliterated Ertra.
(2) Sometimes, but not officially, transliterated as Jibuti.
(3) Some consider spoken Arabic one language but the dialects here--at least Sudanese and Hadrami are not mutually intelligible.
(4) Also spelled Tigrinya.
(5) Also spelled Asmera.